Today’s Cover-4 column covers the finer points of the growing financial gap across the Power 5, some Big 12 commissioner search intel, more NIL drama and much more.
Away we go!
1) The no longer exclusive $9 million club
When Dabo Swinney signed his 10-year, $93 million extension with Clemson in 2019, the deal was billed as the biggest coaching contract in college football history. Only Nick Saban was with Swinney in the $9 million per year club, fitting company for two coaches who had proven themselves as the undisputed best in the business at that point.
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In just three years since, those coaches have company: Jimbo Fisher, Brian Kelly, Mel Tucker and Ryan Day are all averaging at least $9 million per year on their current deals. Lincoln Riley’s USC deal is believed to average (at least) that much per year, and Kirby Smart likely will join that club after Georgia president Jere Morehead recently said the sides are close on an extension that will pay Smart commensurate “with a national-championship winning coach.” (Smart’s current yearly salary averages in the $7 million range.)
It’s not a coincidence that five of those six coaches are from the Big Ten or SEC. (Riley, the outlier, is at a private school in USC.) What’s alarming if you’re Clemson — or for most other schools not in one of the two biggest conferences in the country — is what happens next.
Power 5 conference revenues, released each spring, as part of tax filings, have shed light on just how big the gap is and how big it may become, between the Big Ten and SEC and everyone else. Here’s the breakdown from the 2020-21 fiscal year, in terms of average per-school payout. (Tax returns for the Big Ten and ACC were obtained by The Athletic’s Scott Dochterman and me, respectively. The other three are based on USA Today’s filings.)
- SEC: $54.6 million
- Big Ten: $46.1 million
- ACC: $36.1 million
- Big 12: $35.6 million
- Pac-12: $19.8 million
There is some context behind all of these numbers — the Pac-12 played the shortest season in 2020, the ACC had a full member Notre Dame that year — but the fact of the matter is that the Big Ten is in the middle of negotiating its next media rights deal and the SEC has its new ESPN deal take effect in 2024-25. Those two leagues will continue to separate themselves from the rest of the pack, even with the Pac-12 up for a new TV deal the year after the Big Ten and with the Big 12 up a year after that. The Big 12’s value took a major hit with the defection of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC.
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The ACC is stuck in its deal with ESPN through 2035-36, meaning it will get lapped from its current position for years to come. Back of the napkin math can generate all sorts of varying financial projections — many throughout the industry expect the Big Ten’s imminent deal to be in the $1 billion range annually — but all offer a similar underlying question: How do the other leagues keep up?
“If some of these numbers come in as projected, we’re talking about the ACC being $40 million or $50 million behind the Big Ten after a year; after three years, that’s up to $100 million,” a Power 5 administrator said. “How do you make that up? I don’t know if you can. When even the Northwesterns of those conferences are getting $50 million more than the best of the others, it’s tough.”
What benefits the ACC, or perhaps hinders some of its more marquee schools, is its grant of rights, which runs the length of the league’s TV deal and makes it cost-prohibitive for schools to leave, as they would not be taking their media rights with them. But with that number going down with each passing year, and with the gap between the “big two” conferences and everyone else widening, even that will be worth monitoring in the years to come if you’re Clemson, Florida State and Miami. (And perhaps North Carolina and Virginia.)
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips made it a point during his league’s spring meetings to stress that riches don’t always equal wins, a philosophy that mirrors the line of thinking in pro sports. (Seriously: Do Celtics and Warriors fans watching the NBA Finals care at all about the financial state of those teams? Why would they?) But in college, bigger means better — otherwise Texas football wouldn’t be powerful enough to set the sport ablaze by switching conferences. And better in this case means offering more resources for the top talent, which makes everything that has happened across the national landscape since Swinney signed his last extension so noteworthy.
If anybody in the ACC needed a reminder last month, they needed to look no further than the site of their May meetings in Amelia Island, Fla. There, inside the Ritz-Carlton gift shop, was a line of golf shirts available for purchase.
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They featured four different color blocks of Georgia Bulldogs polos.
2) Big 12 clarity on the way?
Friday’s news of Cincinnati, Houston and UCF (along with BYU) joining the Big 12 starting in 2023-24 brought some clarity to a complicated situation involving multiple conferences.
It paved the way for the American Athletic Conference to bring in Charlotte, FAU, North Texas, Rice, UAB and UTSA in 2023-24. (Conference USA, meanwhile, did the same last month in welcoming aboard Jacksonville State, Liberty, New Mexico State and Sam Houston State for 2023-24.)
But what of the transition of Oklahoma and Texas from the Big 12 to the SEC, which they are currently slated to join in 2025-26?
And, more imminently, what of the Big 12 commissioner search, which is now in its second month after Bob Bowlsby announced his upcoming retirement in early April?
It is pretty remarkable how little buzz that job has generated. That is due in no small part to the looming departure of the Sooners and the Longhorns. But it is still wild to think that this is a conference that has won the past two men’s national basketball championships with two different schools and was seconds away from a third in 2019 when Texas Tech fell to Virginia in overtime. (Let’s not forget that Kansas and Baylor were top-five teams before the 2020 tournament was canceled, too.)
Does any of that matter? Considering football commands roughly 90 percent of conference TV money, no.
The Big 12 has identified an initial candidates list of eight people, a source told The Athletic, but don’t expect an announcement on a decision before the middle of the summer, at the earliest. Next month’s conference media days, held July 13-14 in north Texas, would represent the most optimistic of timelines for when a new commissioner could be hired.
Oklahoma and Texas, meanwhile, still are currently on track to stick around the expanded Big 12 for the next three seasons.
3) Big Ten media rights implications
Colleague Scott Dochterman did a fantastic job this week of breaking down the moving parts of the Big Ten’s current media rights negotiations, a looming megadeal that, directly or not, will dictate so much of what happens next in the fluid world of college sports.
Aside from the fact that Pac-12 and Big 12 will have a better sense of their own market value, consider the implications of what this could mean for the Big Ten’s division discussions and whether the league remodels its conference schedules.
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The ACC is already on the brink of eliminating divisions. The Pac-12 essentially did as much by saying its football title game will feature the top two teams this year. The SEC has openly discussed it as well.
Moreover, what would the potential cutting out of ESPN mean for the visibility of the Big Ten long term? If the College Football Playoff remains a complete ESPN property beyond 2026, that’s tricky. If there are multiple broadcast partners for a (presumably) expanded Playoff, then the equation is a little simpler.
Would CBS really want to be out of the live college football rights business entirely? (Save for Army-Navy.) It’s hard to imagine. Then again, CBS has made out so well with its current SEC deal, which ends after 2023-24, that perhaps the network already thinks it has come out ahead.
And what of NBC? No doubt there were some Notre Dame fans whose eyebrows were raised when reports in the winter indicated that the Peacock network had interest in getting involved with the Big Ten, as an “exclusive home” — with its own times, stations and announcers set well in advance — was a huge part of the Irish’s selling point as an independent.
Notre Dame, however, likely would welcome the Big Ten with open arms. Sort of. The way Notre Dame sees it, a restructuring of its own NBC deal, which expires after the 2025-26 season, essentially would allow the Irish many of the financial benefits of being in the nation’s richest conference without any of the strings attached of being in an actual conference.
Now if only the school and network can figure out who is succeeding Mike Tirico before the Sept. 10 home opener this year.
Whenever the Big Ten does cash in, it will benefit from betting on itself and signing a shorter (six-year) deal than usual. While that was a stroke of genius from previous commissioner Jim Delany, it also speaks to the rapid turnover at the highest level of decision-making in the sport and how that likely changes the calculus of the decision-making. Kevin Warren has not even been Big Ten commissioner for three full years yet, and come Jan. 1, 11 of the 14 league schools will have experienced turnover at the presidential level since Warren took over. Purdue just announced that Mung Chiang will succeed Mitch Daniels at the start of 2023.
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As for the CFP, it was a little ironic that the group’s PR adviser, Ari Fleischer, was seen moderating LIV Golf’s opening news conference last week, some 364 days after the Playoff held a conference call to discuss its proposal to proceed with a 12-team Playoff field as soon as possible.
One year later, we all know how that stroke of communication expertise worked out.
4) Miami embracing reality
So Miami and the letters “NIL” are in the news again, thanks to the NCAA’s meeting with businessman John Ruiz, who opened up to colleague Manny Navarro about his meeting, his deals and how he sees little changing with the way he and his beloved Hurricanes operate.
Can we step back for a moment and recognize The U for being the only honest folks in the room right now? While Saban and Fisher act apoplectic at the mere suggestion of anyone choosing a school for any reason other than academics or the coaches themselves, Miami has dived headfirst into the NIL era and pooled all of its resources into making its football program the best it can be.
And as we have seen in different eras, that is a damn good program when everyone is aligned.
While multiple coaches and ADs scurried by reporters at ACC spring meetings last month, afraid of misspeaking on the brave new college football world they each currently inhabit, new Canes head coach Mario Cristobal — not quite in that aforementioned $9 million club yet, but pretty close — held court for 20 minutes and was as transparent as possible.
It wasn’t quite Mike Brey’s “shut up and adjust” edict to fellow basketball coaches, but the message was similar.
“I’ve been asked about that one a lot, and to me, it’s always been the same answer: If you have to change the way you coach … then you weren’t doing it right to begin with, you know what I mean?” Cristobal said of the increasing demands across the profession. “Does the NIL situation add a different aspect? Yeah.”
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When asked another question about the state of the business, he added: “Me? I love this stuff. I couldn’t want to do anything else, and I’m at my alma mater. Besides all that, coaching is coaching. At some point in time, the ball is placed on the tee and it is kicked off, right? At some point, you are meeting, you are practicing. Some of these other things, there’s still an unknown aspect to it. I think everyone’s working through it. And everyone’s learning a lot more than anything else, right?”
What a breath of fresh air.
(Photo of Kirby Smart: David Rosenblum / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
